Although many of us are choosing to forgo the mad airport scramble in favour of a four hour car ride to somewhere vaguely sunny, to me, a holiday wouldn’t be a holiday without a plane involved somewhere.

Whether you’re travelling with friends, your partner or the whole family, the airport is always going to be a stressful place. However, there is the promise of technology.

Finally, apps and other gadgets are coming through to conquer long queues to the check-in desk, delayed flights and lost baggage, among all the other horrendous things airports and flying brings.

Here’s my pick of the top 5.

5. The baggage tracker

One Aussie airline has had the brightest idea in the history of air travel – electronic tags that are attached to your luggage in order to track it.

Attached at the check-in desk, this little tag contains information about the passenger and flight destination, and can be located from anywhere in the world. So, as long as it doesn’t fall off your bag, you may never have to deal with an incidence of lost luggage again.

Currently, the “Q-Bag tag” is only available on Qantas, but hopefully it’ll soon be snapped up by other airlines.

4. iFlight UK app

This app resembles an airport arrivals/departure board, and tracks flights in and out of the UKs nine major airports.

You can search for your flight using the flight number, or just track the flights to/from the airport of your choice. Never again will you get to the airport super early to find that your flight has been delayed by hours and hours.

3. iPad/iPhone 4S

OK, less of a gadget, more of a revolution, but one of these two little things could save you hours of boredom before or whilst you’re flying.

Especially useful if you’re travelling with kids, just fill the memory with fun games and ebooks, and know that you’ll be hearing, “But I’m BORED!” a lot less.

Siri is a great way to keep little ones (and big ones) entertained. Just get them to ask silly questions, and see if they can find the hidden funny answers from the IVR software. Hours of fun, trust me.

2. Noise cancelling headphones

These can often be pricey, but if you want to keep your sanity on a long-haul flight, noise cancelling headphones just might be your saviour. Besides, they’re cheaper than a first class ticket and you will have them ready for our return flight.

The best ones I’ve discovered are the Bose QuietComfort 15 – they replace noise with excellent quality sound, so you can drown out that screaming baby with crisp clear acoustics.

1. External battery

If you fly a lot, this could be one of the most useful purchases you make. Having an external battery to plug your phone, iPad or iPod into can make the world of difference on long haul flights, or even if you’ve been delayed at the airport.

In my experience, the best one is the Mophie Juice Pack Powerstation, a compact battery that will power up your Smartphone or tablet in record time with juice to spare. It’s also compact, so taking it on the plane is no hassle.

You’ll never again have to resort to watching the in-flight movie.

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We all now depend on our home computer for things from online shopping and booking tickets for events, shows and holidays to getting directions from Google maps, keeping in touch with friends via social media like Facebook and Twitter and catching-up with TV programs. That’s why it’s so frustrating when your internet connection speed drops to a crawl.

A simple test you can do is to open a browser window and type either speedtest.net or speakeasy.net into the address bar. At either website, clicking “Begin Test” will let you see both your upload and download speed. You can then compare these with the standard speeds that your Internet service provider is advertising. If it is significantly below what you are paying for, phone them up and check why the speed of your internet connection is slower than it should be.

It is also a good idea to repeat these tests several times a day for a period of several days so that you can get an idea of the average speed of your internet connection. Many people find it useful to keep a record of these results in a Microsoft Excel or text document.

You can buy and download an internet connection speed monitor – there are even some free ones available online. Read the installation information carefully before saving and running the program on your computer. If you leave an internet speed connection monitor running while you are browsing the internet and make a note of the time and speeds, it will help you to see when your computer slows down and why – it may be at a certain time of day or when you go to a certain website that requires a lot of bandwidth. You can increase your connection speed by regularly running anti-virus, defragging and keeping up-to-date with the latest fixes and service packs.

Windows 7 Taskbar already has a total connection speed and network usage monitor (just go to the Networking Tab). Apparently Microsoft Windows 8 Taskbar comes with individual program-wise network usage monitor, but if you plan on sticking with Windows 7, Vista or XP you could use a third party software for monitoring network usage and connection speed.

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All blog owners want to secure their blog from hackers. The worst nightmare for any blogger is getting his/her blog hacked by someone. WordPress is one of the most used CMS, so it is a prime target for hackers. Hackers will delete the files and database of your site and steal personal information. So, we need to take some security measures to keep our WordPress blog safe from hackers. Below are some tips which can be used to secure our WordPress blog.

Choose a Strong Password:

You need to choose a strong password for your WordPress blog and hosting account. A strong password includes use of numbers, capital letters and symbols. Never use your birthdate or any dictionary word in your password. It is good to use password generators which are present in your hosting account if you don’t get ideas for a strong password.

Take regular Backups of your Database and Files:

Make a habit of taking a Backup of all your Database and Files at least once in a week. There are many plugins out there which does this job for you. I recommend installing BackWPup as it takes a full backup of files and database automatically at a scheduled time and can send the backup to online storage drives like Sugar Sync, Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Storage Rack Space and Microsoft Azure.

Never install nulled plugins and themes:

Nulled plugins or themes is a pirated or cracked version of the original plugins or themes. Do not go for nulled plugins and themes. Always download themes and plugins from your WordPress dashboard.

Keep your WordPress version upto date:

Update your WordPress version as soon as a new version is released because the new version may contain some security fixes. Also keep your plugins and themes upto date as authors of themes and plugins may have fixed some loop holes in the new version.

Install Security Plugins:

There are a lot of plugins out there which are concered about your blog’s security. Login Lockdown is one of them. It restricts the rate at which failed logins can be re-attempted from a given IP range. So you are free from password guessers and brut force attackers. You can also install ‘BulletProof Security’ plugin but I don’t recommend it for newbies as it is very complicated and if configured in a wrong way, it can damage your site.

Change the default ‘admin’ username in WordPress:

Many bloggers use Fantastico or Softaculous to install WordPress. This automated installers keep the default username ‘admin’ which new bloggers usually don’t feel to change. The username ‘admin’ is common to everyone, even the hackers. So they can go for your password. As WordPress username, once fixed cannot be changed via Dashboard, you can change it via phpmyadmin. Just go to wp-users table and locate your username and change it.

Prevent the WP-Admin section from being indexed:

Search engine spiders, by default indexes everything unless they are told not to do so. Admin section contains all the sensitive information of our blog and hence we should prevents spiders from indexing it. You can do it via cPanel or by editing your robots.txt.

Scan your PC and blog for malware:

The hacker might be controlling your browser with a malware, so it can easily access all the information from your browser. So perform a full scan your PC and blog atleast once in a month.

Do you think I missed some points. If yes, then I would love to hear from you.

Image Credit

No related posts.

One of the best stock photography sites for bloggers is called Depositphotos and they have a great program where they are offering a free trial subscription for other bloggers who are willing to test out their service and write a post about them.  You gain the benefit of getting dozens of high quality stock images you get to keep and use just about anyway you want while they get the benefit of being showcased to your audience.

In addition, you can offer to host a contest and give away a free subscription trial for one of your readers and they can gain the benefit of testing out Depositphotos for themselves.  I have been using Depositphotos almost exclusively for all of my blog image needs since January 2012 when they first contacted me and asked me to start my own free trial.

They have over 7.5 million images to choose from and there are so many categories they have something on their site that would fit virtually any niche or category blog.

I encourage fellow bloggers or web site owners looking to add more image content to consider trying out the free subscription for bloggers from Depositphotos.  You can get up to 150 images or more if your site generates enough traffic, they take the time to work up a fair subscription plan with you in exchange for reviewing and writing about their stock photography site.

For those who finish up with their free trial, or who want to look right away at benefits and pricing just visit the Depositphotos site and search for images, and you can see how vast the library is, you can choose to purchase individual images for a reasonable price but you get much better value when you purchase a subscription plan.

I serious found everything from marketing images, gadget images and even some great dragon logo’s and images.  In fact if you see the buttons in the H3 font on this site, these were made from an image I got from Depositphotos.

See Example H3 Button

You can even find entire collections of social media buttons as well, you can pick up a whole slew of new share buttons for your site with the free subscription.

So if you are a blogger consider getting a free subscription plan in exchange for a review by checking out their Depositphotos for bloggers offering.

-Dragon Blogger

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Online shopping can refer to any transaction where goods or services are bought and sold on the internet. It can be sub-divided between websites where businesses sell directly to customers (B2C) and those where businesses sell to each other (B2B). One of the leading examples of the former is Amazon which launched online shopping in 1995, followed by eBay in 1996.

Many online shopping sites use shopping cart software that lets customers add or remove items from their basket. The analogy with high street shopping is continued by the process of “checking out” just like you would do at a till when the payment and delivery information is submitted by the customer to the retailer. When the transaction is completed, you will normally receive an email from confirming your order. Once you’ve signed up to an online shopping site like Amazon, it will store your personal details (name, address, credit card) so that you don’t need to enter them every time you buy something.
As well as submitting credit card details, online shopping websites also allow customers to pay for the goods that they are buying by a number of alternate methods such as billing to a mobile phone, debit card, electronic money or gifts cards and vouchers.

Once your payment has been verified by the online shopping website, there are a number of ways in which the goods or services that you have bought can be delivered. Shipping an item direct to the customer is the most obvious and the most common. But the methods of completing the order can also include downloads (as with software, music, films), being given an order reference number to pick up goods in a store or printing out a barcode emailed to you that allows customers to pick up airline, train, film or concert tickets.

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